Abstract
We were saddened to receive the news last week of the death of Daniel Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD, who has been a major voice in integrative oncology since the 2007 publication of his book Anticancer: A New Way of Life. Servan-Schreiber was the cofounder and director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also conducted research in psychiatry and neuroscience.
Servan-Schreiber was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor at the age of 31 years. He underwent treatment, but the tumor recurred 5 years later. While being treated for the recurrent tumor he began to realize the potential for natural therapies to prevent and control cancer and other conditions. His personal interest in this area eventually led to Anticancer, which spent several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was translated into 35 languages. He also published Healing Without Freud or Prozac: Natural Approaches to Curing Stress, Anxiety and Depression (2003). This book also received international interest.
Anticancer introduced people around the world to the power of cancer-inhibitory foods, stress reduction methods, the benefits of vitamin D, the problems of refined foods, and many other aspects of the anticancer lifestyle. Servan-Schreiber’s philosophy was truly integrative and maintained that conventional treatment was an important mainstay of cancer therapy as well. His evidence-based information was that much more powerful because he had walked the path of this lifestyle himself, as a patient facing a deadly tumor.
His final book, published in June 2011 in France, is titled On peut se dire au-revoir plusieurs fois (We Can Say Goodbye Several Times). Last year, physicians found that the brain tumor had recurred and metastasized. Servan-Schreiber died July 24, 2011 at the age of 50, after fighting his cancer for 19 years. Sadly, we say a final goodbye to our dear friend. While we honor David’s contribution to our field and the help his work brought to an enormous number of people confronting their own cancers, we also recognize his heartfelt spirit and the courage he embodied in standing up for his shared convictions.
This is the first issue in which we are publishing articles in our companion online-only section. Because of increasing volume of high-quality submissions, we decided, in consultation with our publishers at Sage Publications, that an online-only section for the journal was merited. We announced this last year and began directing articles that contained only in vitro information, as well as commentaries, letters to the editors, and other article classes to the online-only section. As of this summer, we will also direct articles with in vivo information to the online-only section, since we have now begun receiving more human studies and clinical trials. These human studies are closer to the main interests of our subscribers, and we are prioritizing them for print publication. However, we will continue to place commentaries, letters to the editor, and in vivo or in vitro articles that are of special interest into the print publication. All articles in both the print and online-only sections will appear in the table of contents for each issue. The online-only articles will have DOI numbers instead of page numbers. Further details on the policy are available on the journal’s website, http://ict.sagepub.com.
In our lead article in this issue, Judith Payne of MD Anderson Cancer Center presents a systematic review of literature on the question of whether disrupted circadian rhythm might be the cause of cancer-related fatigue. We previously published an entire special issue on circadian disruption and are thus especially pleased to see this article.
Jan Baak of Stavanger Hospital in Norway, along with colleagues from China, provides an addition to his article on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment that appeared in the June 2011 issue of Integrative Cancer Therapies. This article uses a creative approach to determine whether lag time to treatment could be the major factor controlling their results. The implications of their June article are further explored in the Guest Editorial and in this issue’s online-only section.
Two important research articles from Pine Street Clinic in San Francisco appear this month. Pine Street is a TCM clinic that works largely with cancer patients. Michael McCulloch and colleagues present an intriguing and innovative epidemiological method for analyzing retrospective data from their clinic.
Judy Trevena from the Dunedin School of Medicine surveyed physicians in New Zealand about their opinions regarding integrative cancer treatment. Given the sometimes substantial challenges in implementing integrative therapies in conventional settings, this remains a topic of considerable interest.
Beginning the laboratory section of this print issue is a chemoprevention study from Pradeep Goyal and colleagues at the University of Rajasthan, India. This study analyzes Syzygium cumini, commonly known as jamun, jambol, or java plum, which is used in traditional medicine in India and China.
Thymol is a monoterpene, a phytochemical of thyme and oregano species. Satish Rao and colleagues of Manipal Life Sciences Center in Karnataka, India, present observation on its radioprotective qualities in the current issue.
Our final article is another of the online-only publications. This article by Spencer Shawn of Florida A&M University, with colleagues at Daly University and Zhejang University, explores the potentials of extracts of the American cockroach as an anticancer agent. This insect has traditionally been used against a variety of conditions in southwestern China. Readers will be happy to learn that this annoying insect pest does have some anticancer activities. Perhaps we can look forward to a time when roaches, like ginseng, are so prized for their medicinal uses that they have become extinct in the wild and are only available from specialized breeding colonies—hopefully located far from the urban centers they now infest!